People are living longer and, may outlast the money they set aside for retirement

David Sherman, Ottawa Citizen05.02.2014

Bette Haining is a 94-year-old widower who just loves living at Unitarian House. “I just feel safe here,” she says. “And I’ve so many good friends.” Bette Haining erupts in laughter as friend Kay Walker plants a smooch on her during a Tuesday morning cooking class at Unitarian House of Ottawa. Unfortunately, there is not enough seniors housing like Unitarian House, and the shortage will worsen as baby boomers age.Julie Oliver
/ Ottawa Citizen

Bette Haining, a widow, loves living at Unitarian House of Ottawa. ‘I just feel safe here,’ she says. ‘And I’ve so many good friends.’ One of them is Christina O’Neil, executive director of the affordable housing complex for seniors.Julie Oliver
/ Ottawa Citizen

Bette Haining, centre, loves living at Unitarian House of Ottawa. Here, she is joined by friends at their Tuesday morning cooking class.Julie Oliver
/ Ottawa Citizen

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For Bette Haining, the golden years do glitter. The 94-year-old is healthy, energetic, good-natured and a delighted occupant of one of 68 apartments for elderly in Unitarian House of Ottawa.

A widow, Haining and her husband signed up for the $876-a-month one-bedroom apartment after they watched the building going up on their evening strolls around the neighbourhood. But her husband died before they could move in, and she grew uneasy living alone.

“The roof creaked at night,” she says. “I was nervous. Now, this is the most wonderful place to live. You never have to be alone.”

Haining’s apartment is her life condensed to a single bed, a dresser with pictures and bric-a-brac, a kitchenette and a building with friends, nurses 24/7, meal service if she wants and amenities such as a gym, entertainment, a library and a caring staff, as personified by executive director Christina O’Neil, who has spent 30 years working with the older folks who call the house home.

Unitarian House is a model of what could be and perhaps what should be. But most aging folks are not as lucky as Haining. Unitarian House cut off its waiting list at more than 700. There are still more than 200 hoping for places.

In Ottawa, says Donna Rubin, chief executive officer of the Ontario Association of Non-Profit Homes and Services for Seniors, about 2,000 seniors, defined as those over 65, are waiting for places in assisted or rent-geared-to-income housing.

“People are waiting eight to 10 years,” Rubin says.

Advances in medical care mean many are living longer. At Unitarian House, it’s not uncommon for people to live past 100. Increasingly, the elderly are retired for 30 to 40 years; some spend more time in retirement than they did working.

“The big issue … is people are outlasting their money,” says Carol Burrows, 78, the chair of United Way Ottawa's Seniors Affordable Supportive Housing Task Force. “I hear people say all the time, ‘I didn’t think I’d live this long.’ ”

And soon the boomers will be causing the waiting list to bulge. Canada’s 65-and-over population will grow from about five million today, or about 15 per cent of the population, to 10 million by 2031, or about 23 per cent of a projected population of 44 million. And no one knows what will become of them when they hit old age.

The Peter Pan generation, who never thought they would age, might find themselves crash-landing when the reality of old age stoops their shoulders, impairs their hearing and eats away at their joints. For many, 60 is not the new 40. It is 60.

While the news isn’t all bleak — there are a few affordable assisted-living accommodations and seniors’ residences being planned or built — but a project often takes about seven years from initial inspiration and funding to design and completion.

“What we did for our children,” says O’Neil, “We will have to do for ourselves.”

For-profit developers are building dozens of “five-star hotels,” retirement homes for the well-heeled, in anticipation of boomers with bucks. And some cost as much as $7,000 a month or $85,000 a year. The most rudimentary are about $3,500 a month or $42,000 a year. If you live 20 years in a home, you need about $840,000 to retire on.

“If you live on a pension, if you have no home that’s paid off, it’s a very difficult situation,” says Rubin.

Few between age 65 and 70, technically considered elderly, are in need of assisted living. Most start needing help with essentials such as meals, bathing, transport, medication and mobility when they are 75 and over, when the golden years can tarnish.

But even if you have a mortgage-free home, says Toronto-area MPP Donna Cansfield, who champions seniors’ housing issues, the odds are that you have fallen victim to rising property values and rising taxes. Homes working people bought for a song in the 1960s are now valued in the high six figures while their owners are struggling to live on a pension that probably can’t cover taxes, utilities, and maintenance.

“Working people with modest incomes (and government pensions) can’t afford to stay in their homes,” she says.

And, says Cansfield, even if they can pay the freight, winters lock them in. Frailty makes that season perilous. Many cannot shovel snow, and icy sidewalks are a minefield. Their homes become their prisons.

“Their only option is to sell their home,” says Cansfield. “And then where do you go?”

Many, she says, might have to opt for small-town life where housing costs are affordable, but then people find they’re isolated from family and friends, living in an unfamiliar neighbourhood, — a culture shock for those living in cosmopolitan cities where people of colour and exotic groceries and restaurants are on every corner.

The panacea being advocated by most, except for-profit developers, is finding a way to keep “old elderly” in their homes as long as possible by increasing the care offered by visiting health practitioners and other caregivers.

More home care by people to do laundry, prepare meals, change linen, help people bathe and get ready for bed, clean homes, ensure medication is properly taken and drive people to appointments, be it doctors or hairdressers, banks or clothes and food shopping, means less institutional or group living

“We need to keep people out of hospitals. We need to develop a whole new strategy,” says Donna Cansfield.

Susan Eng, vice-president of advocacy for CARP, which speaks and lobbies on behalf of retired people in Canada, says people save for their retirement, and retirement getaways and even retirement homes, but “assisted living is not in their radar. They are not saving for a home-care worker.

“There is going to be a critical mass of people who need help.”

Cansfield wonders if the government should subsidize people staying at home, through tax credits to defray municipal taxes that were bumped up when former Ontario premier Michael Harris cut provincial taxes by off-loading them onto municipalities.

Or, she asks, should governments build more seniors’ housing and more long-term care and assisted-living homes?

Stephen Golant, a professor who teaches in Florida, wrote a paper on seniors’ housing for Simon Fraser University in B.C. He advocates a public-private partnership, which would encourage private developers to build assisted-living homes for seniors with the help of taxpayers, “a highly desirable alternative.”

Golant says complicating elder care is the fact that families have fewer children to look after parents, and increasing divorce rates mean elderly couples often live apart and their children often live out of town and/or are divorced as well.

On top of that, their children are in their 60s, with infirmities of their own and are often not in the best of shape to help parents in and out of bath and bed, even if modesty is not a factor.

Canada lacks respect for the dignity of its older citizens, says Douglas Angus, a professor with the Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa. He points to the U.K., the Netherlands and France where quality home care has reduced hospital stays, he says.

He agrees there is room for the private sector to work with governments on building more beds for older folks in need, but it’s not happening.

Angus says we need to increase wages for home-care workers to make it more attractive as a career option and provide income support for family members who have to forgo work to stay home to look after ailing elderly.

“The warnings have been there for a long time,” says Angus. “We know what we need to do. … But there is a real lack of political will.”

But Jim Dunn, associate professor, chair in Applied Public Health, Canadian Institutes of Health Research at McMaster University in Hamilton, says bringing in the private sector means adding profit margins into the cost.

Forging a society that is age friendly involves not only better home care, Dunn says, and more housing units, but also a co-ordinated effort from several sectors to build “senior-specific neighbourhoods” where amenities are close by, sidewalks and streets are kept free of snow and ice, and housing is affordable.

“How do we design to ensure that people can be independent as long as possible?” he asks. “How do we make it attractive to revitalize the downtown core (of some cities to make them elder-friendly)?”

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People are living longer and, may outlast the money they set aside for retirement

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